Friday, December 15, 2006

4:17pm

The Office for National Statistics has missed a trick here: according to that bastion of rigorous statistical analysis, Somerfield supermarket, the mean time at which family arguments break out on Christmas Day is 4:17pm. (http://express.lineone.net/news_detail.html?sku=887). Sadly, it seems that the standard deviation and kurtosis of this distribution has either not been calculated, or not released to the media, so we cannot judge how sharply peaked, if at all, this distribution is about the mean value.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:14 am

    I agree that a 95 confidence interval would have shed more light.

    It's probably something like, "95% of Christmas Day arguments take place between 8am and 11pm".

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  2. Anonymous11:55 pm

    oh God, i haven't heard phrases like "standard deviation" in 12 years, since i taught myself statistics from a 400-page textbook over about 4 months, for an exam i failed anyway (it turned out i only had to know how to use SPSS). That really gives me the heebie-jeebies. The Mann-Whitney U-Test, etc...god, it's all coming back...

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